Olympic champion not sufficiently recovered from fractured wrist and pulls out of Spanish Tour
Euskaltel-Euskadi will start the Vuelta a España, the third Grand Tour of the year, at the ed of this month without its team leader Samuel Sanchez. The Olympic champion finished the Tour de France with a fractured wrist, sustained in a heavy crash on stage 17 to the Col du Tourmalet. Despite the crash, he managed to finish the stage in fifth place, and finished the Tour in fourth place overall.
Last year Sanchez finished second in the Vuelta, just 55 seconds behind Alejandro Valverde, and would have been odds on to go one better this year; especially with Valverde now suspended. He was originally in the long list for the race, but this was dependant on how he was feeling in Saturday’s Clasica San Sebastian.
“Samuel is in the list of reserves for the Vuelta,” Fundación Euskadi president Miguel Madariaga had told El Mundo last week, “but we can’t say at the moment if he is going to participate or not. He must recover from the fissure that he has. After San Sebastian we will know if Samuel can to continue training and riding his bike.”
Unfortunately Sanchez had not recovered sufficiently and, despite his 9th place in San Sebastian, he has been forced to pull out of the Vuelta team.
The orange team has listed five riders who will definitely start the race in Sevilla on August 28th: Igor Antón, Beñat Intxausti, Egoi Martínez, Gorka Verdugo and Mikel Nieve.
There are six riders who are in contention for the other four spaces: Koldo Fernandez, Juanjo Oroz, Pablo Urtasun, Amets Txurruka and Alan Perez. Oroz has recovered from the knee injury that forced him to abandon the Tour de France, while Txurruka is recovering from the broken collarbone that he sustained on stage 4 of the race between Cambrai and Reims.
The absence of Sanchez in the Vuelta team could be a big blow to Euskaltel-Euskadi. The only rider in what is virtually the unofficial Basque national team not to have been born in the region would have been its best chance of a podium finish in the race. With a probable cut in the budget for 2011, which may cost the team its ProTour status, a good showing in the Spanish national Tour may have helped attract a new sponsor to make up the shortfall.